North Carolina continually struggles to balance the environment and the economy. Exhibit A is the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. You can read about that here. But here are four of the other big environmental fights in North Carolina. Offshore drilling Although offshore drilling along North Carolina’s coast has been discussed for years, it took a major … Read more
Nearly all of the Republican losses in North Carolina and around the country in 2018 came in suburban areas. Cities stayed blue. Rural areas stayed red. But the suburbs, usually sympathetic to the GOP, shifted in droves, turned off by the rhetoric from the president, demagoguery or business as usual. Opponents have done an effective job … Read more
What should the goal of redistricting be? For years, it’s been to give one party the maximum possible advantage. This probably isn’t ideal — especially now that self-sorting and technology make gerrymandering brutally effective. Gerrymandering has been back in the news after the 2018 elections, which saw Republicans maintain their 10-3 advantage in North Carolina’s … Read more
For years, areas on the outskirts of North Carolina’s largest counties reliably went red. These parts of Mecklenburg and Wake counties — towns like Huntersville, Matthews, Holly Springs and Wake Forest, and certain wedges inside city limits like south Charlotte — are more suburban, more affluent, more white, and more likely to vote Republican. Or … Read more
If you follow North Carolina politics, you’ll see the same words coming up again and again. Some of them are the common, everyday tropes of campaigns. But some words and phrases, in particular, have really gotten legs in 2018. Many of them are used — and over-used — on both sides of the aisle. Here … Read more